Fedora Core 6 Test 3 on a dv8000

Fedora Core 5, no, Fedora Core 6 Test 3 (No Name) on a dv8000

Continued from Part 1

Ah... finally, the reboot cycle was gone. This time around, the booting was normal. Like all Tests series, the quiet on the kernel commandline in grub is quietly ignored (for debug purposes), and Fedora boots with all its underpinning showing. After it booted, the first thing you notice and as mentioned on the Fedora 6 summary page, the artwork is all new. The GDM splash screen is new, though too dark for my taste. Fedora 6 now features a new "DNA" look with the double-helix connected by the Fedora symbol. Well no matter. The GDM is still "cool". Once you log in, you notice that the background is a larger version of the GDM screen, too dark. As I said, I am not a big fan (you have seen my screen) of this dark look and in any case, I will end up changing it to a background picture that I have taken on my various trips. My current screen is a shot of the foot of Mount Mansfield in Vermont.

First boot now proceeded to configure my system. I have already mentioned that the touchpad was not doing so well and all my clicks were turning out to be 2 clicks. So, it sort of ran through screen display and sound and all that. I turned off SeLinux (as I have done before), and it reminded me that that was not a good thing. For a home system, I really don't think I need a security system invented by the NSA! Anyway, before I could configure anything, it was time to reboot.

The Desktop

The first thing you notice is that X is much better at configuring your system. I did not have to select a monitor and then select my resolution. Anaconda had correctly selected my screen size and adjusted accordingly. However, if you check display, it still shows 800x600. Minor issue.

This is where you notice ... nothing. So far, there is nothing here that I cannot do in Fedora 5. I have yet to find something new in here. There is mention of new DejaVu font as the very first improvement on the Fedora 6 summary page (see resources). However, I am already using that on Fedora 5. So nothing new here.

Eye Candy

There is supposed to be a new windows manager Compiz, which uses AIGLX (see resources). However, this is not available to x86_64 since currently there is a bug that prevents it from working correctly on a 64bit architecture. Moreover, if you are using a NVidia card, you are also out of luck. So, this is not ready for prime time yet. Note that 3D is not available to us either since neither the radeon driver that ships with X or the ATI drivers will provide that to the owners of this machine.

One exciting thing is the possible availability of new icons and svg based look-&-feel. However, it is not available yet. Again, it is currently available for Fedora 5 and so not a compelling enough reason to switch.

The Internet Connection

Now I proceeded to install ndiswrapper, since i cannot function without it. As I said here before (see resources), I tried to use bcm43xx before, but it is still not mature for my use. Installing ndiswrapper is a breeze. Since my home directory was intact, I proceeded to the ndiswrapper directory and did

make clean
make install
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -m

Now I disabled bcm43xx. The easiest way is simply to rename bcmw43xx.ko to something else or you can blacklist it by putting it in the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. Having done that, I removed bcm43xx and put ndiswrapper in its place.

rmmod bcm43xx
modprobe ndiswrapper
dhclient wlan0

The blue wireless light satisfyingly lights up, and we are online! I then updated the system

yum update

noting that there are 300 odd MB updates available. There are no dependency problems and the update proceeds smoothly. Now we have a functioning Fedora 6 Test 3 desktop system with Gnome 2.16 running.

Further Testing

I have no doubts that when Fedora 6 comes out finally, I will probably switch to it. At the present time, I am not seeing any compelling reasons to move to FC6. The artwork by itself is not sufficient. The current eye candies are not available and boot problems will keep a lot of potential testers at bay. I think I will wait for final release before I comment on it further. There is also a call by some of the testers to add a test 4. We will see what happens next.